Producers: Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz and Anthony Vaccarello Director: David Cronenberg Screenplay: David Cronenberg Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Jeff Yung, Eric Weinthal, Vieslav Krystyan and Ingvar Sigurdsson Distributor: Janus/Sideshow
Grade: B
“How dark are you willing to go?” is a question that David Cronenberg has been asking audiences for more than fifty years. Some viewers have responded enthusiastically to the invitation to follow him, even when the director has taken his exploration of forces that transform the human body from within and without to extreme levels. Others have declined, finding even his more conventional, accessible films too chilly, austere and obscure for their taste and his more distinctive offerings repellent.
In “The Shrouds” Cronenberg puts the question into the mouth of his protagonist Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), who’s made up to look a bit like the director and has suffered the loss of his wife, as Cronenberg has. But one shouldn’t try to take the comparison very far.
Karsh delivers the line near the film’s opening, after an introductory scene set in the office of his dentist (Eric Weinthal), who informs him that his teeth are rotting from grief. Perhaps in response, he goes on a date set up by the doctor, hosting Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at an elegant restaurant situated incongruously in the middle of a cemetery. He explains that though he’s had a career as a maker of technical films, he now owns both the restaurant and its odd locale, a very unusual cemetery indeed.
As his wife Rebecca (Diane Kruger) was being prepared for burial, he says, he felt the urge to get into the coffin with her. So he designed a system that simulated doing so: called GraveTech, it involves covering the corpse in a shroud equipped with a scanning system that provides an extraordinarily detailed feed (“encrypted, pun intended,” he adds) recording the body’s deterioration. “I’m in the grave with her,” Karsh says, which will become truer when after his death he will be buried beside her. The other tombstones are similarly equipped, allowing bereaved families equally intimate connection with their dearly departed.
Sandra is intrigued, but is apparently uninterested in a second date. Karsh instead spends some time with his sister-in-law Terry Gelernt (also Kruger), Rebecca’s twin, who abandoned her career as a veterinarian and is now a dog groomer, a job she finds more amenable. She also occasionally boards canines while their owners are away. He shares with her his concerns about some odd growths he’s noticed in the recent scans of his wife’s bones. Are they caused by the cancer that ended her life, or something more sinister? Otherwise he’s content to have his life kept in order by Hunny (also voiced by Kruger), a virtual assistant created for him by his brother-in-law Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce), Terry’s technically adept but emotionally neurotic ex-husband. He also, however, experiences flashbacks—or waking hallucinations—of Rebecca returning from her treatments, parts of her body removed and pained by his attempt to hug her brittle bones.
Karsh is soon confronted by a serious business problem: someone has desecrated the cemetery, toppling over some of the headstones and disrupting the scanners’ transmissions. His project director Gray Foner (Elizabeth Saunders) will handle reconstruction and customer relations, but he will have to deal with larger issues—the expansion of the GraveTech system throughout the world, including to a site in Budapest proposed by a terminally ill mogul, Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystan), whose blind wife Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) comes to Toronto to confer with him. The two develop a warm friendship that seems destined to develop into something more intense, especially after Karsh discovers that his planned burial plot is already occupied by the corpse of Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), Rebecca’s oncologist, with whom she was having an affair during her illness but who has suddenly disappeared.
The plot gravitates into conspiratorial territory when Maury detects that someone has hacked into the GraveTech system, perhaps from Iceland, where Karsh’s associate Elvar (Ingvar Sigurdsson) reports to him about a cemetery site there. But Maury is an unreliable source, suspicious that Karsh is having an affair with Terry, with whom he hopes to reconcile. He also claims to be controlling Hunny and to have worked with those who desecrated the cemetery, a group he identifies with Russian interests. Karsh also comes to suspect the motives of the Chinese firm that has provided financial backing for GraveTech, as well as Dr. Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung), another of Rebecca’s oncologists, whom he consults about those inexplicable growths on his dead wife’s bones. The upshot is a suggestion that Chinese and Russian intelligence services might be attempting to develop the Shroud technology into a surveillance system that would go beyond the dead to the wider population. And Terry, a conspiracy theorist, encourages that idea.
If all this seems more than a little complicated, that’s because it is, and Cronenberg isn’t interested in tying all he threads together in a neat little package. His purpose, as usual, is to provoke thought about the human condition, not merely to shock, and as usual he’s willing to admit that the questions he poses are really insoluble. There are elements of horror here—the close-ups of decaying bodies (and the consequences of Rebecca’s medical treatment) are deeply unsettling, though quite restrained in comparison to the gore-filled excess commonplace in today’s Hollywood shockers. But “The Shrouds” is a cerebral exercise rather than a visceral thriller, proceeding largely through dialogue rather than action. But it’s typically Cronenbergian in terms of its themes and preoccupations, and though slow, solemn and ultimately perplexing, it fits perfectly into his remarkable body of work.
It’s also typically elegant. Carol Spier’s production is frostily beautiful, and set off gorgeously in Douglas Koch’s steely cinematography, the icy visuals italicized by Howard Shore’s brooding score. Christopher Donaldson’s deliberate editing gives the plot room to unfold without rush, and the cast time to add grace notes to their characters. Cassel is suitably unflappable as Karsh, while Kruger brings remarkable variety to her multiple roles. Pearce, having a banner year, makes Maury totally different from the imperious Harrison Van Buren of “The Brutalist”—weak, querulous, and obsessed. The rest of the cast do what is required of them without fuss, including a dog with the incongruous name of Paddington.
“The Shrouds” may not stand among Cronenberg’s best, but it’s a worthy addition to an extraordinary oeuvre that has maintained its unique personality for more than half a century.